Work Item Keyboard Shortcuts, Resolving Mercurial Work Items, WikiPlex 2.0

Keyboard Shortcuts

With this release, we have added a set of keyboard shortcuts for common tasks in the Issue Tracker. This feature is a popular request in the CodePlex Issue Tracker. The CodePlex team visits the issue tracker frequently when researching and considering new features. If you haven’t visited it recently, please take a few moments to log an idea or vote for the features you would most like to see implemented on CodePlex.

To view the available shortcuts, type ? from any page within the issue tracker to see this help dialog:



You can see what each shortcut invokes below:



Please give us feedback on this feature and let us know what additional shortcuts would be useful.


Resolve Work Items When Pushing Mercurial Changes

Another feature we added is the ability to resolve work items when push changes to your Mercurial repository, which has been available to our TFS / SVN users for quite some time. The required format is identical to the SVN format listed here. When committing your changes locally, add "Work Items: Id, AnotherId" to your commit message.



When you push, CodePlex will detect this comment, add a commit message, and resolve the work item.



WikiPlex Goes 2.0!

CodePlex continues to improve WikiPlex, our open source wiki engine. Wikiplex hit another major milestone today with the release of version 2.0! We have added several new features, including: interleaving ordered and unordered lists, specifying the height and width for images, a multi-line indentation macro, and a restructuring of some of the API. Visit Matt's announcement for more information on the release or grab the binaries via NuGet or CodePlex.

Profile Picture Thumbnails, Following Projects, and Fork Collaboration

Profile Picture Thumbnails

We have added a way to select a thumbnail from your profile picture, which will start appearing next to usernames across the site. Managing your thumbnail is simple. From your profile page, choose Edit your profile. On the left side, you’ll find an intuitive widget for choosing a profile picture, uploading it, and editing your thumbnail image.



If you previously uploaded a profile picture, we’ve used that to generate a starter thumbnail. We welcome your suggestions and ideas for areas where seeing user thumbnails would be useful or interesting.

Following Projects

Based on some feedback we’ve received recently, we have taken several steps to help you discover and follow interesting and popular projects on CodePlex:

The homepage now surfaces the top Projects Users are Following from the previous 7 days.
When you visit any project homepage, you can see at a glance how many people follow the project.
When you visit the People tab for any project, you will see both the project contributors and the 25 most recent project followers.


Fork Collaboration

We now support enabling collaborators on a fork based on a large number of user requests.

From the Source Code management page for your fork, you will now see the following on the right side:



To add a collaborator, type in a username and click Add. All fork collaborators will have the ability to push to the fork and send/cancel pull requests. To remove a collaborator, hover over user, and click on the X that appears:



The CodePlex team values your feedback, and is frequently monitoring Twitter, our Discussions and Issue Tracker for new features or problems. If you’ve not visited the Issue Tracker recently, please take a few moments to log an idea or vote for the features you would most like to see implemented on CodePlex.

Windows Live™ ID Support, Download Page Ads, and Other Changes

Windows Live™ ID Support

The #2 requested feature for CodePlex has been to support logging in using your Windows Live™ ID account. We’re happy to say, that with this release this is now possible! The next time you visit the login screen, you’ll see a “Sign In” button at the top.



Once that button is clicked, you’ll be redirected to Windows Live™ ID to authenticate. Upon successfully authenticating, you’ll be redirected back to CodePlex. When you return to CodePlex, you’ll be prompted to login with your CodePlex credentials to associate your Windows Live™ ID account to your CodePlex account.



A quick Q&A that should answer the most important questions:

Q: Why do I still need a CodePlex account?
A: We still require a CodePlex account to successfully authenticate with the source control servers.

Q: Can I use my Windows Live™ ID login when connecting to TFS or Mercurial?
A: No. Both TFS and Mercurial require Active Directory credentials to verify your identity.
Q: Will I have to still log in with my CodePlex credentials every time I authenticate with Windows Live™ ID?
A: No. This one-time operation is required to associate your Windows Live™ ID account with a CodePlex account. Successive authentications with Windows Live™ ID will automatically authenticate you with CodePlex.

Q: I’m a new user and would like to authenticate with Windows Live™ ID. Do I first need to register with CodePlex and later associate it with my Windows Live™ ID account?
A: No. You can click the Sign In with Windows Live™ ID button on the user registration page. Upon authenticating with Windows Live™ ID, you’ll be redirected back to CodePlex to complete your user registration.

Download Page Ads

CodePlex allows project owners to include ads on their project pages from The Lounge, with the ad revenue going directly to either the project owners to help support the project, or donated to Habitat for Humanity Int’l.

With this release, we enabled a new feature that will dramatically increase the ad revenue for project owners to better support their project. When a user downloads any file from a release, they’ll be taken to a page displaying two 300 x 250 pixel ads while the file is downloading. This download page only applies to projects where the project owner has decided to include ads on their project.



Mercurial Hosting Changes

In this release we have made a few minor changes to our Mercurial hosting.

We upgraded the server software to version 1.5
We are always using canonical URLs for repositories (https://hg01.codeplex.com/WikiPlex will be redirected to https://hg01.codeplex.com/wikiplex)
Fork clone URLs are displayed as clickable links (bug #25371)
Downloading and browsing the latest source code will always use the most recent change set from the “default” branch
Search Term Suggestions

With this release, we have introduced a Search Term Suggestions popup when typing in any of the project search textboxes. After typing 4 characters, you’ll be presented with a listing of terms other users have searched for. You can then use either your mouse or the up/down arrow keys to select one of these existing search terms.



PowerShell Syntax Highlighting Support

In this release we have added syntax highlighting support for PowerShell scripts. This includes support in the source code browser, wiki (via {code:powershell} syntax), and a code syntax selection for discussion lists. You can see an example of this output in the SQL Server PowerShell Extensions project.